A typical content leasing scenario involves a subscriber and a content provider. The subscriber agrees to pay the content provider for the right to access and use digital content associated with a service provided by the content provider. The digital content includes digital media such as audio, video, and images, or any combination thereof. The content provider agrees to allow the subscriber to download and use the digital content on her playback devices, such as a computer, telephone, mobile device, or the like, as long as she is subscribed to the service provided by the content provider. When the subscriber cancels the subscription, digital rights management (DRM) technology renders the digital content issued under the subscription agreement, and that she downloaded to her playback devices, unusable. There is a need for a content leasing system that allows the subscriber to reinstate a canceled subscription agreement so that the digital content issued under the canceled subscription agreement, and downloaded to playback devices, becomes usable once again by the subscriber.
A prior art solution to allow the digital content to become playable once again implements this content usage model with the help of “root” and “leaf” content licenses. A root license represents a subscription, while a leaf license represents an individual piece of stored content. Since a leaf license “chains” to a root license, license verification requires the validation of both the leaf license and the root license. If the root license is expired, then all leaf licenses that chained to it also expire. Thus, when a user renews her subscription, she obtains a new root license. The advantage of this prior art solution is that it does not require the user to re-acquire every single “leaf” license for every piece of content when she renews the subscription. However, this prior art solution only works when the infrastructure (e.g., a license server) is aware of a license identifier for at least the root licenses stored on the device because that license identifier would allow leaf licenses to chain to the root license.
Internet Protocol Rights Management (IPRM) is a prior art DRM ticket-based architecture that delivers digital content over an Internet Protocol (IP) network as described in U.S. Published Patent Application Number 2003/0093694 (granted as U.S. Pat. No. 7,243,366), the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. In an IPRM architecture, the infrastructure is not aware of content license identifiers. An IPRM content server (i.e., license server) securely supplies a set of content rights, including a content key, and the device itself locally creates and encrypts content rights with a rights identifier that is unique only within that one device. So, another solution is needed for use within IPRM that takes advantage of the existing IPRM ticket-based architecture and does not require additional messaging to be defined or additional new objects to be stored on a device just to implement this feature.
Thus, there is a demand for a system and method for accessing digital content stored on a computing device. The presently disclosed invention satisfies this demand.